After 20 years in the perfume business Jo Malone talks to Bryony Gordon about
her career and gives her an exclusive preview of the long-awaited new
fragrances
.

To most people, Jo Malone is a candle scented with lime basil and mandarin or a beautiful cream bag complete with lovely black ribbon handed to you by an unimaginative husband on your birthday (though received very gratefully). She’s a way of life packaged up in a wild fig and cassis fragrance; middle-class aspiration distilled into a vanilla and anise room spray. She is a superbrand and a lifestyle choice. But an actual human being? Ha!

I want to poke her in the face just to check she is real. But poking people in the face when you have only just met them is rude and, anyway, she’s crying, which is all the proof I need that Jo Malone is flesh and blood.

“I’m sorry,” she says, having become all emotional about her new project. And there’s the next surprise. If Malone had ever existed in my mind, then her voice would be a soothing lullaby; instead, it’s pure Bexleyheath, the place of her birth.

The lovely lifestyle that Malone managed to package into forty quid candles – though some go for up to £260 – has been the result of a long, hard fight, which partly explains the wet eyes. We meet in a hotel in Sloane Street. It’s just round the corner from her Chelsea home, but a long way from the council house in Kent where she grew up. She left school at 13 to look after her mother who had suffered a stroke, but Malone is severely dyslexic, so the education system was never really for her.

“I used to take soap to the cheese grater to try to create something smelly I could melt down like a candle,” she says. “The cauliflower cheese the next day always tasted funny.”

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Malone set up her eponymous fragrance brand almost 20 years ago. Back then she did facials, but her real passion was fragrance. She created nutmeg and ginger bath-oils to send to her clients as thank yous: they loved them so much that her husband, Gary (or Gazza as she calls him), quit his job as a surveyor to help her to set up a shop in Chelsea.

The customers rolled in, seduced by the simplicity of her scents (they had only one or two notes in contrast to most fragrances). She was picked up by Bergdorf Goodman in New York. Intoxicated by the cream boxes and scent sprayed on tissue paper by elegantly dressed boutique assistants, women began to call themselves “Jo Maloniacs”.

In 1999 she ended up selling the brand to Estée Lauder for “undisclosed millions”. She stayed on as creative director and had a son. Then, in 2003, Malone was diagnosed with breast cancer. “And all my motivations changed,” she says.

Malone left the company soon after, though her relationship with Estée Lauder has remained close. The company flew her to New York for the very best care.

“I still feel that tingle from the day I got my biopsy results,” she says. “The appointment was switched from 1pm to 5pm and I knew something was wrong. Gazza – where would I be without Gazza? – told me not to be so silly. But we went in there and they told me I had to have a mastectomy the next week. Gazza fell on the floor. It was one of the most awful, awful moments.

“I had a good old cry. Went back to the hotel, bawled my eyes out. And then I thought: 'I’m not going to die.’ In the same way that building a business is a mental game, I was going to mobilise that energy to beat the cancer.”

She had one round of chemotherapy which didn’t work – “That was an incredibly low point” – and then another, and has been all clear for five years now.

Malone is 47. She has millions in the bank, a battle with cancer behind her, and an MBE. She took her doctor to Buckingham Palace when she received it from the Prince of Wales. “I was wearing a giant Philip Treacy hat with this huge feather, which got stuck in the taxi door,” she says. “It was severed in half but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Anyway, he [the Prince of Wales] told me he had always wanted to meet me.”

What did she say? “Oh, I burst into tears.” I think that Malone should be putting her feet up, relaxing a bit, enjoying the spoils of all her hard work. “Oh no,” she says. “When I want to switch off I think of business. I love business!”

So it is that Malone has decided to start all over again, with a new brand called Jo Loves. Five people have been working on it for a year over her kitchen table, and yesterday they launched a website containing a teaser for the range, which will reach the shops in a few months.

It’s like the cosmetic equivalent of Led Zeppelin reuniting. Fashion and beauty websites exploded with excitement when the announcement was made. I feel quite privileged to be the first nose outside her house to smell the new range – she has brought the three new fragrances with her to the hotel, housed in Muji bottles and kept safely in plastic zip bags.

She calls them the Royal family, and for good reason. There is what she calls a “clean” scent, and then there is the fragrance she calls her “best friend”, which is all warm and lovely. Finally, there is a rich perfume “that you would wear to a black-tie dinner. It’s jewels and glamour and naughty knickers. It’s like falling into a whole lot of velvet.” And it is.

Malone has no formal training, but her nose is so good that when her husband once tried to surprise her by joining her for a night at a posh hotel, she could smell him when he reached the lobby. She tells me that she sees and feels everything in scent; it wouldn’t surprise me if she had synesthesia, a condition which causes people to mix up their senses. “I went to a party recently and had to wear something glamorous,” she says. “So I picked out a top with sequins on it. As soon as I put it on, I felt a bit ill, because it smelt of the soap I used when I was having chemotherapy. I had to take it off.

“I can’t remember a point when I wasn’t governed by my sense of smell,” she says. “Because I am dyslexic I have always used it to remember things by. When I look at that” –she points at her red scarf – “I see pomegranates and grapefruits. I see fragrance. It’s like having a paint brush for a nose; I get these ideas in my head and translate them through my nose into colour and texture.”

Is she nervous about her new venture? “I was at first. I couldn’t find my feet, I had been out of it so long. That was a shock to me. I thought 'Aagh, I have no ideas!’ But I remember exactly when it came back to me, the rich moment that got me taking my notebook out and writing things down.”

And that was? “In Primark in Oxford Street.” She falls about laughing.

Jo Malone is so grounded that I have to ask: does she ever feel distanced from herself when she sees a woman walking down the street with a bag bearing her name? Is it akin to having a strange out-of-body experience? She smiles and shakes her head.

“I just feel pride. I feel as if I am in my twenties again. I think 'I’m a working-class girl, and I created that.’”